Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went mask-off last week, promising behind closed doors to roll back abortion access even further, and telling religious pro-life hard-liners that he wanted the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the right to abortion to become “permanent in every single state.”
Blanche made the comments in a “prayer call” last Thursday hosted by the White House Faith Office and attended by various faith leaders. The call was not open to press and not on the record, although the entirety of the call is now up on YouTube.
“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said. “If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that.”
“They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs,” Blanche added, singling out abortion pills.
This is a far cry from the answer he offered at his confirmation hearing, when he claimed he would “carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act,” the 150-year-old law that bans the mailing of contraceptives and other things considered to be “obscene.”
He also noted that the Trump administration is “putting practices and policies in place” to block abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol from being sent to states that have banned abortion, a process that would require the Justice Department to invoke the Comstock Act—something President Trump specifically said he wouldn’t do back in 2024 while campaigning.
“A vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote ‘so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,’” Senator Patty Murray wrote Tuesday on X. “Those were his own words to anti-abortion extremists. Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”
Florida has become a very weird state. There’s hardly a conspiracy theory that Governor Ron DeSantis is not championing, especially when the subject is public health. DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as the state’s surgeon general, putting the lives of Floridians at risk.
Dr. Ladapo doesn’t believe in vaccinations. Disregarding science, he has sought to make all vaccines a matter of choice, not the protection of public health. Thus, no matter what other medical professionals may say, Dr. Ladapo wants to ban all vaccines mandates.
It’s an odd time to take a stand against vaccinations. Florida is experiencing an uptick in measles cases: As July 2026, Florida has reported 154 confirmed measles cases. Florida ranks among the states with the highest measles case counts in the country this year.
Nationally, the CDC reports 2,371 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. so far in 2026—the highest annual total in more than 30 years.
Now Florida’s state attorney general has threatened to withhold public funding from Catholic schools unless they allow their students to opt out of vaccines.
Florida’s attorney general has threatened to pull funding from Catholic schools unless they allow their students to opt out of vaccine requirements.
James Uthmeier, the attorney general, revealed on X that he had sent a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops (FCCB) expressing concern that schools within the faith may refuse to grant religious exemptions for vaccinations for the upcoming school year.
The letter, which was sent on July 31, is the latest in a series of pushes by lawmakers to change Florida’s vaccine mandates.
According to Uthmeier, at least one diocese appears to have “embraced” a position raised by the National Catholic Bioethics Center that the schools cannot offer exemptions on religious grounds because the Catholic Church does not teach that use of vaccinations produced in cell lines derived from the tissue of an aborted fetus is “intrinsically evil.”
Uthmeier, a Catholic himself, says that such a position is “concerning” as state law requires public and private schools to offer exemptions if parents have religious objections.
“I therefore urge Catholic schools to comply with Florida law and grant religious exemptions to school vaccine policies,” Uthmeier wrote. “Failure to comply could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs.”
The Archdiocese of Miami says that over 95 percent of students attending the city’s Catholic schools are on some kind of state scholarship, according to The Miami Herald. Many receive around $6,500 with which to pay for their tuition.
Uthmeier has demanded an answer to his letter by August 7.
Michele Taylor, a spokesperson for the FCCB, told CBS News that the conference is reviewing the letter and will respond to the attorney general.
“Be assured, Florida’s Catholic schools are operating in accord with the law and Church teaching,” Taylor said.
Under state law, students attending both public and private schools must be vaccinated against diseases including polio, chickenpox and measles. Schools, including Catholic institutions, do permit medical exemptions from vaccines with a valid doctor’s note.
Vaccination mandates have increasingly come under attack in Florida, with Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general, likening the mandates to “slavery” late last year.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in your body?” he said. “I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”
Ladapo also pledged to end “every last one” of the mandates.
However, experts slammed his claims, with Democratic state Representative Anna Eskamani branding the plans a “public health disaster in the making.”
The Florida Education Association also said that reducing vaccinations puts “children’s health and education at risk.”
Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire. His wife Priscilla Chan is a pediatrician. Ten years ago, they founded and funded a school that was designed to be different. They sought out children who were impoverished. Their school offered wrap-around services. They did all the right things.
But they are withdrawing their funding because they are disappointed by the school’s test scores. Test scores! Had they no better way of measuring success? Apparently not. Their scores were substantially higher than those of the local school district. But that wasn’t good enough. Were the children healthier? Were parents more engaged in their children’s education? In the end, the school was closed because its scores were not “good enough.”
It was supposed to be a long-term commitment, but it wasn’t. CZI surely could have made a 25-year commitment to their school but they pulled away their funding after only a decade. Do they have enough evidence to determine the value of investing in children’s well-being? No.
As I said, this is a very sad story.
Laura J. Nelson of The Wall Street Journalreported:
The school that Dr. Priscilla Chan co-founded for low-income students was designed to be different.
The vast fortunes being minted in other corners of Silicon Valley had mostly missed East Palo Alto, Calif., where the Primary School opened in 2016. Funded through Chan’s philanthropy with her husband Mark Zuckerberg, the private, tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” through wraparound services, including free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.
The school joined a long list of efforts by the country’s wealthiest, dating back to Andrew Carnegie, to put their stamp on the American classroom. Then, after a decade of operation and more than $125 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Primary School shut down in June.
Dr. Priscilla Chan SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The board voted unanimously in April 2025 to close the school after learning that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wouldn’t fund it after the 2025-26 academic year, people familiar with the situation said.
The school’s demise marks the end of one of the highest-profile education efforts funded by the couple’s philanthropic arm, which has shifted its focus from social issues toward scientific research.
By some measures, the school’s academic performance fell well short of state norms and its leaders’ expectations, complicating efforts to spread its model to public and charter schools. By others, it succeeded in helping students outside the classroom in ways that are usually not available in public schools.
Board president Jean-Claude Brizard said that before the vote to close, he shared several options with CZI about the school’s future, including “winding down.” The board wouldn’t have voted to close without alignment from their biggest funder, he said.
A CZI spokesperson said the decision to close was up to the school’s board and that the organization was focused on the school’s academic results, not the cost.
The Primary School’s closure has illustrated what philanthropic investment means for a community when it arrives, and when it leaves.
“It was a godsend school,” said Mele Fakapelea, whose daughter Telesia won a lottery spot in the founding class. Fakapelea later enrolled her four younger children. Losing the school’s support system, she said, was “crushing.”
Mele Fakapelea, in red lei, and her family at the eighth-grade graduation for her eldest daughter, Telesia, center. SAO LUTUI
Nearly 540 children were enrolled at the Primary School’s two campuses. The Ravenswood City Elementary School District is now preparing for an enrollment surge, renovating a campus to avoid packing students into portable trailers.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pledged $50 million when the closure was announced. That includes paying the balance of the school’s lease to the district and supporting local groups to carry on some services. CZI also gave $3.6 million to education savings accounts: $10,000 for elementary students, $2,500 for preschoolers and $1,000 for children in early-childhood education.
Business leaders and founders “look at K-12 education and go, ‘Man, how hard can it be to improve this thing?’” said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Well, it’s incredibly hard.”
Zuckerberg announced one of the couple’s first major charitable gifts, a $100 million grant to Newark, N.J., public schools, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2010. The Primary School was far more hands-on.
Chan said then that her work as a pediatrician, and at a Boston housing-project after-school program, had taught her that systems to help children are often siloed. The school set out to help children overcome the effects of poverty and childhood trauma.
Staff worked with community clinics to find high-needs families, including students with behavioral issues and learning disabilities. Three in four students spoke a language other than English at home.
Some things felt more startup than school. Teachers signed nondisclosure agreements as part of their employment contracts. Some toddlers wore recording devices at home to count back-and-forth conversations with their caregivers, part of a program to boost language development.
Chan was on campus often, including to read a Mo Willems book (“The Pigeon Needs a Bath!”) to kindergartners. During the launch of a curriculum with Sesame Workshop, Chan bantered with Elmo in a promotional video. Teachers attended the workshop’s 50th-anniversary gala and met Michelle Obama.
Parents were on campus regularly for coaching sessions and classes about child development.
But the school had some challenges, including high principal turnover. It also initially lacked clear plans and approaches for special education and student discipline, former employees said.
Katherine Carter, a former middle-school principal hired as a consultant in 2019, said there “really was not an understanding of the amount of time and support” and planning to launch a school. Carter, who left in 2024, said it can take five years for a new school’s approach to gel.
It took time for the new school to find the right curriculum and policies, said Lindsey Luebchow, a founding member of the Primary School. Principal turnover, she said, was one result of the structural challenge of “managing many programs in a single school.”
Chan was the Primary School’s co-founder and board chair for about eight years, until 2023; CZI was the main funder. Having one major backer in perpetuity hadn’t been the original plan, CZI said, but rather a model that “could be sustained through primarily public investment.” To that end, the Primary School said it tried to keep per-pupil spending at a reasonable level for a public school.
Jean-Claude Brizard, chairman of the board of directors for the Primary School SITTHIXAY DITTHAVONG/AP
Chan lobbied her network “to bring in other funding sources,” CZI said. But finding donors to supplement CZI was a tough sell, said Brizard, who is the former head of Chicago’s public schools. “Why would you give money to an entity being funded by one of the wealthiest people in the world?” he said.
Chan was “not shy” about her frustration with academic performance, Brizard said. Chan told The Wall Street Journal last year that outcomes weren’t where “frankly, anyone would have wanted them to be.”
Early last year, soon after Zuckerberg and Chan attended President Trump’s inauguration, CZI told staff its mission was changing. Funding for social advocacy had been “wound down” over the past several years to “align with our focus as a science philanthropy as well as the current legal and policy landscape,” staff were told. There was no evidence that the couple’s attendance influenced the board’s vote, CZI said.
That April, the Primary School’s board voted unanimously to close after the next academic year. The timing of the CZI changes and the inauguration, Brizard said, was “an unfortunate coincidence.”
Angelica Cardenas, 29, whose 3-year-old daughter was enrolled along with her siblings’ five children, said she heard about the closure from the news. “If they knew they were going to stop investing in our community, it should have been spoken about earlier on,” Cardenas said.
Some staff and parents said they thought the Primary School would last for decades, in part because it was focused on long-term outcomes.
“This was never something that was supposed to be just a philanthropic play in perpetuity,” Brizard said. “Maybe that wasn’t articulated well enough.”
A Stanford University report found that in spring 2025, 14% of local students in third grade and above exceeded literacy standards; at the Primary School, it was 26%; statewide, it was 47%.
Eighth-grade students, many of whom had attended the school for a decade, demonstrated above 50% grade-level proficiency in their final year, the school said.
Luebchow said students saw “steady and encouraging” academic progress after the pandemic, and pointed to improvements in children’s well-being and socio-emotional skills. About 85% of students had their annual well-child visit, compared with 55% of children on Medicaid in the county.
Every teacher returned for the final year. School leaders told parents: We understand if you don’t want to stay. If you do, we’ll close the year out strong.
School leaders arranged tours of other schools, set up a station for parents to complete admission applications, and called in a representative from a 529 savings plan to help parents open the accounts seeded by CZI.
Parents and teachers tried to savor the “lasts”: the last back-to-school night, with Pacific Island dancers on a tapa cloth mat. The last pep rally, where children blew red vuvuzelas.
Fakapelea’s oldest daughter, now 13, was one of two speakers when the school’s lone class of eighth-graders graduated in June. She cried afterward, as her family draped her in leis.
When Donald Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, it was a breathtaking display of arrogance and greed. An independent contractor leaked Trump’s tax returns in 2019, along with the returns of other very wealthy people.
A few things to know about this event: the individual who leaked tax returns was convicted and sent to prison. The leaking of tax returns occurred while Trump was President. Trump was expected to release his tax returns as other presidents had done since —, but he never did.
Federal Judge Kathleen Williams made clear that she found the lawsuit fishy, since it was not an adversarial proceeding. As she pointed out, when Trump sued the IRS, he was essentially suing himself since he was in charge of the department he was suing. She was coming close to the conclusion that the lawsuit had no adversary and was possibly a fraud on the court.
Before she issued a ruling, Blanche and Trump announced that they had reached a settlement: Trump would drop his suit in exchange for the Justice Departnent agreeing to set up a fund of $1.776 billion to pay people who had been unfairly targeted and harmed by the federal government. They also agreed that the IRS would not audit Trump or his family (it was never clear whether the agreement covered audits up until 2026 or audits past and present.) Since Trump owed the IRS about $100 million, this piece was very important to him.
Judge Williams issued a ruling and declared the entire agreement void. She said that Blanche and Trump could not even call what they had done a “settlement,” because the terms they agreed to had no legal force.
Senators from both parties were outraged by the slush fund, which they believed would give payouts to the January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump friends such as Rudy Giuliani and others who helped his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Acting Attorney General Blanche assured them that the slush fund was dead but he refused to put it in writing.
When Trump nominated Blanche to be the Attorney General of the United States, two Republican senators said they would block him unless he produced a letter revoking his agreement with Trump.
Friday’s dismissal of the Department of Justice case against David Hearn for vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool came days after Hearn’s lawyers asked for transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictment. The lawyers noted that the government’s only witness testified that the pool was already damaged before Hearn went near it, and that the witness could not quantify the cost of any damage Hearn might have done over and above the cost of repairing the existing damage. The lawyers told the court there were “irregularities in the government’s presentation of the evidence to the grand jury” that “call into question whether the grand jury was misled.”
The Department of Justice has been caught repeatedly misleading grand juries or committing misconduct in getting indictments. Hearn’s lawyers were suggesting that the Department of Justice engaged in the same misconduct in the indictment of David Hearn for damaging the bottom of the reflecting pool.
In their filing, they noted that a judge and former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia had recently stated that “[g]enerations of presidential administrations and public officials” have reinforced the idea, called the “presumption of regularity,” that public officials do their jobs properly, operate in good faith, and follow correct procedures. But, the judge noted, “In just six months, the President of the United States may have forfeited the right to such a presumption.”
On July 28, J. David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala, and Carla Astudillo of ProPublica reported that judges across the country are calling out lawyers for the Department of Justice, questioning whether they can be trusted to tell the truth and whether they are operating according to centuries-old norms. Judges have called behavior by Department of Justice lawyers “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly,” and otherwise dishonest.
The degradation of the Department of Justice, which is charged with defending the rule of law for the American people, into an instrument of Trump’s political wrath has been illustrated in the fight over the confirmation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to attorney general.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
On July 29, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Secret Service agents who interviewed Comey in May 2025 were told to send a summary of that interview as quickly as possible to Trump on Air Force One. Trump’s close involvement in the case, the authors wrote, “is one of the most glaring examples to date of the degree to which Mr. Trump now directs federal law enforcement actions.”
On July 28, Comey’s lawyers filed motions to throw out on the grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution the federal charges Blanche brought against him. They noted that Trump had repeatedly made it clear he wanted Comey indicted, even going so far as to put his former special assistant Lindsey Halligan into office as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where she indicted Comey just four days later. (That appointment was later found to be invalid.) The filings from Comey’s lawyers appear to show that FBI officers engaged in warrantless surveillance of Comey.
Like the lawyers in the Hearn case, Comey’s lawyers suggested that “irregularities in the grand jury process influenced the grand jury to return an indictment.” Like Hearn’s lawyers, they asked the court to “disclose the transcripts and audio recordings of all proceedings before the grand jury in this case” or to review them himself to make sure they followed the law. In a previous case against Comey, they note, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick found that the government’s actions raised “genuine issues of misconduct” that were “inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation.”
Blanche’s indictment of Comey to please Trump colors another of his actions: he backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund but is clearly Trump’s main interest: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
That slush fund/nonprosecution deal has been a sticking point for Blanche’s Senate confirmation to attorney general, as two Republican senators—John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—want him to put in writing that the deal is as dead as he claimed it is in his confirmation hearing before they agree to support his nomination. But he has refused to do so. On Thursday, Trump suggested he was willing to withdraw Blanche’s nomination until Cornyn and Tillis are out of office, leaving him as acting attorney general.
Then, at 7:03 Friday morning, Trump threw a monkey wrench into this fight by posting that in fact, he emphatically supports the slush fund. He appears to reject the idea that it is dead, and seems to be counting on Todd Blanche to implement it, exactly as critics have said.
Trump seems to have been thwarted from getting his way quietly by putting Blanche in as attorney general without any promise to kill the slush fund and its accompanying promise not to prosecute Trump or his associates for crimes associated with their tax filings. And so, on Friday, Trump filed notice that he and the rest of the parties to the “agreement” will appeal the July 13 ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams. She said that the suit that led to the $1.776 billion slush fund and the accompanying nonprosecution promise was filed to “manipulate the judicial process.” Williams said the Justice Department could not claim the deal it made with the Trumps was a judicial agreement.
At 7:32 Saturday morning, Trump posted: “If Senators Cornyn and Tillis, both upset because I wouldn’t Endorse them (they lost, and quit, respectively!), aren’t going to approve Todd Blanche, one of the most respected professionals, according to everybody, in the Country, to be the United States Attorney General, then I will keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill, which takes care of those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration (I get nothing, although I was treated horribly!), PASSED. Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”
After Richardson had posted her commentary, near midnight last night, CNN reported that Todd Blanche released a written statement declaring that he was rescinding the slush fund. This was what Senators Cornyn and Tillis had demanded, and it appeared that they are likely to vote to confirm him tomorrow.
The document released Sunday also limits the addendum to that agreement that offers the president and members of his family immunity from tax investigations — a sticking point for Cornyn. The senator wanted Blanche to explicitly acknowledge that it applies only to past tax investigations against the president and those listed in the IRS lawsuit.
The Sunday order says the measure “applies by its terms only retroactively” and that it applies only to “the named parties in the lawsuit” referenced in the agreement.
Bottom line: Blanche abandons the slush fund but reaffirms that the IRS will not audit Trump or his family or the Trump Organization for any tax cheating in the past. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, this was Trump’s main interest, not the slush fund.
So if Cornyn and Tillis are satisfied, Trump gets what he wanted: freedom from having his tax returns audited retroactively. This saves him at least $100 million, possibly much more.
And if Blanche is confirmed, Trump gets what he’s always wanted; his Roy Cohn in charge of the Department of Justice, pursuing his enemies and defending Trump’s actions.
The New York Times recently quoted a group called “Third Way,” which attacked Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the winner of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary.
Robert Reich writes that this portrayal of “Third Way” is “moronic bullshit.” He explains that Third Way is composed of corporate executives and financiers. He writes “There’s no ‘middle’ between neofascist corporatism and democracy.”
The kind of corporate BS now cropping up all across America
Friends,
The statements seem as belligerent as Pete Hegseth on a bad hair day.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” says Jonathan Cowan.
Cowan is president of Third Way, described by The New York Times as a “leading centrist Democratic group.” Cowan’s Third Way is preparing a $15 million war chest to “discredit democratic socialism.”
Pointing to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary last week, Cowan warns that “it is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potential presidential swing states.”
Well, I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without revealing who they really are.
If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.
Odd that The New York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.
Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett has even conceded that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector. (That’s the same Matt Bennett, by the way, who helped stage the infamous “Dukakis in a tank” photo-op that helped sink Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.)
At this point in his article, Reich identifies the members of the board of Third Way, each of whom is a corporate titan.
Oh, and Third Way’s honorary co-chairs have included West Virginia’s former Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona’s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said about its governing structure.
In 2020, Third Way claimed that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would add more than $13 trillion to the federal deficit, although most other analyses — including one by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — found that Sanders’s plan would save trillions while providing healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans.
Well, of course Third Way attacked Bernie’s plan. Among Third Way’s donors are pharmaceutical giant Amgen, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health (which acquired health insurance giant Aetna in late 2018), and health products and drug company Baxter International.
Other corporate donors to Third Way are or have been members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that links lobbyists with state lawmakers. Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, CVS Caremark, DuPont, and trade groups the Consumer Technology Association and NCTA – The Internet and Television Association are members.
Third Way donors have also given money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations. Among them, Entergy, Facebook, Google, and Reynolds American, according to tax records.
After the Democrats’ 2024 election losses, Third Way argued that the party should reduce its dependence on small-dollar donors. In a five-page memo of “takeaways” from the election, Third Way asserted that small-dollar donors’ preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.”
The memo stopped short of naming alternative funding sources, but the implication was clear: Less grassroots support means more reliance on big checks from super PACs and wealthy donors, which is exactly what Third Way prefers.
The memo also included calls to curb “far-left influence,” adopt a “pro-capitalist” stance, and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.”
***
So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”
And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”
Instead, focus on what’s really happening.
Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.
This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.
Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida constitution:
a) The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.
Article I, Section 3;
Religious Freedom
There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.
The Florida state constitution explicitly requires that the state provide a free public education for all children. It explicitly forbids the use of any public funds for religious schools. In 2012, then Governor Jeb Bush promoted a referendum to change the constitution and allow vouchers for religious schools. Florida voters resoundingly said NO. But the voice of the people did not dissuade Bush and his friends.
Florida now has a full/blown universal voucher system where the state funds children who attend religious schools, private schools, even home schools, regardless of family income. Most of the children who use vouchers were already in nonpublic school.
The state now spends billions of dollars every year on charter schools and vouchers. Many charter schools operate for profit. Their lobbyists work in tandem with the legislature, which seems eager to defund public schools.
Ironically, Jeb Bush used to boast that Florida was successful because of its toughs count ability. Yet this is the same governor who pushed through vouchers, even though voucher schools have NO accountability.
Go figure.
Stephanie Vanos wrote the following article for the Orlando Sentinel. She is a member of the Orange County School Board, where her children are enrolled.
She wrote:
There is an alarming misuse of public funds in Florida that isn’t just unfair and irresponsible, it undermines our state’s constitutional obligation to provide a high-quality, uniform education for every child and erodes trust in the very system meant to serve all of Florida’s children.
The taxpayer-funded voucher program has created a shadow educational system, one where billions in taxpayer funds move with little oversight, leaving families and communities in the dark about how their money is spent. This lack of accountability and transparency has created a fractured, unequal education landscape, robbing students of stability and opportunity no matter where they go to school.
Approximately $5 billion in taxpayer money is being siphoned away from our traditional public schools into voucher systems. Private schools that accept vouchers are held to a tiny fraction of the standards our public schools must meet, if any at all. Nearly a quarter of all state funding for education is now drained by voucher programs that serve only 15.3% of Florida’s students and overwhelmingly benefit families who were already paying to send their child to private school. How is this fiscally responsible?
The consequences of this system are clear in Orange County, where my kids go to school.
This year, our county was forced to close seven public schools and cut hundreds of positions despite the district earning high grades. An estimated $315 million of education money will be diverted from Orange County Public Schools to vouchers just this year. These closures and loss of funding are a direct result of a state system that puts politics and profits ahead of students.
Traditional public schools across the state are held to incredibly high standards on how and what they teach students, who they hire, how they report grades and more. However, the taxpayer-funded voucher program and charter schools are not held to the same standards and measures of accountability despite receiving public tax dollars.
Charter schools, deemed public schools by law, sometimes serve an unmet need in a community, and may operate transparently under a fully nonprofit model. In some cases, they can benefit our larger communities. However, charter schools operate with far fewer requirements and accountability measures than traditional public schools, and far too many are franchise operations, run by for-profit management companies that benefit affiliated for-profit entities with our tax dollars.
Andrew Eggers of The Bulwark writes here about the close connection between Katie Miller, wife of Trump confidant Steven Miller, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They worked together closely during the pandemic. They were friends. But it is longer wise for Katie to befriend Dr. Fauci. In MAGAland, he is the Devil incarnate.
Eggers writes,
By now you’ve probably read plenty about congressional Republicans’ latest struggle session against Anthony Fauci—the mean-spirited publication of his COVID-era diary, the barrage of ridiculous and misleading questions at his Senate hearing, the crude spectacle of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeting a photoshopped image of himself clapping the doctor in handcuffs.
Yesterday, though, my attention was captured by a far smaller, sadder side plot in the Fauci affair spotlighted by NOTUS—one involving Katie Miller.
During Trump’s first term, Miller was a senior aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and therefore a close colleague of Fauci’s on the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, which Pence chaired.
From his journal entries, it’s clear that Fauci quickly took a liking to Miller, whom he viewed as a bright young colleague and for whom he developed an almost grandfatherly affection. “Katie Miller is great (tough, smart, but great),” he wrote in March 2020. “Katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room,” he wrote two months later.
The work of grappling with a brand new, barely understood pandemic was stressful, both professionally and personally—after all, the task force could get the virus too. At several points, Miller leaned on Fauci for medical advice. “I am calling Katie frequently to check on her couple times per day,” Fauci wrote after Miller tested positive for COVID in May 2020. “She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone.”
This was still awfully early days in the pandemic, when little was yet known about the relative risks COVID presented to various groups. Think of how genuinely terror-stricken Miller must have been. Think of how reassuring it must have been to have America’s top infectious-disease expert on hand not just to advise her, but to show personal concern for her physical and mental health. Miller, NOTUS reports, went back to Fauci repeatedly for medical advice throughout the pandemic: later that year when her husband tested positive for COVID, and again when their newborn experienced an unrelated medical episode. In the latter instance, Fauci records, he called the baby’s doctors directly to ensure she was getting good care.
Miller purports to feel differently now. “Dr. Fauci was neither my friend nor my doctor, but a work colleague who weaponized my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandize himself,” she wrote on X yesterday. “As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I can say with certainty after witnessing his con close up this man should be in prison. Justice for the American People.”
Miller’s claim here—that she was only relying on Fauci’s pro bono medical advice to “keep her enemies closer”—beggars belief. Nor does her explanation of his behavior make a bit of sense: Apparently, he “weaponized [her] pregnancy and child” to “aggrandize himself” by . . . showing concern for her well-being and going out of his way to help her out from time to time. And he kept it all private even as the Millers and the rest of the Trump movement turned him into a bogeyman. Sinister!
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Still, it’s easy to see why Miller is twisting herself in these sorts of knots. Fauci has become one of the MAGAsphere’s chief villains, while she’s become one of its influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers and an odd soft-focus podcast aimed at MAGA moms. The ecosystem she’s chosen to live in is one dominated by political paranoia and intramural accusations of secret disloyalty. Fauci’s diary drop must have been a nasty shock. What if some clout-chasing rabble-rouser used it to try to expose her as some sort of Deep State plant? Better to get ahead of the accusations by cooking up some ridiculous “cover story” for associating with Fauci—and to call for his jailing too, just to be on the safe side.
Now, of course, Miller does a lot of things that I personally find a little difficult to wrap my head around. This, after all, is a woman who has tried to get the FBI to criminally investigate her neighbors. This is a woman who once lost her cool in a TV debate and started threatening her interlocutor with deportation. This is a woman who married Stephen Miller.
Still, it’s interesting to see a human side of Miller emerge in Fauci’s diary entries—and incredibly depressing to see her treat that human side as a four-alarm PR fire. What a bummer way to make a living, swimming in this revolting internet ecosystem. Hard to imagine she’s having a lot of fun.
Greg Olear, author and blogger, saw Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey at a matinee on the first day it was released. His review is informed, thoughtful, and incisive. If you never read The Odyssey, you will enjoy reading Olear’s review and learning about it; if you have read it, even long ago, you will enjoy his review.
I saw the film two days ago in the one movie house in the village of Greenport, NY. No IMAX 70 theater. The Odyssey is spectacular. If it doesn’t win the Academy Award, I willl be astonished. So too for Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, both of whom are wonderful.
The critical reviews that I read were picky and insubstantial. Elon Musk was outraged by the film’s ethnic diversity. Helen of Troy is portrayed by a Black woman, Athena is brown-skinned. One character, a soldier in Odysseus’ army, is well-known as trans (Elliott Page).
Musk allegedly has hired Mel Gibson to make a new film about Homer’s classic, one that is “historically accurate.” Bring it on. Homer never mentions the race or ethnicity of his characters.
The works attributed to Homer were created around the 8th to 7th century BCE, probably between 725 and 675 BCE, as oral poetry. Who knows what is historically accurate?
The great effect of the film is that it is a great motivator to read the original. It may even contribute to a revival of the classics.
May the deities bless Christopher Nolan, who brought the film to life.
Past a certain point, recorded history recedes into darkness, just as our individual memories of early childhood vanish into a twilight oblivion. If the siege of Troy by the Mycenaean Greeks isn’t a false historical memory—and I don’t think it is; I think it’s an actual historical event—then the war took place in a past so remote that its events have merged with fiction, mythology, and dream so as to be indistinguishable.
How long ago was it? By the time Homer came along, some three thousand years ago, the Trojan War was already a distant memory. Between the fall of Troy and The Odyssey of Homer came the Late Bronze Age Collapse of 1200-1150 BCE, followed by the Greek Dark Ages, a gaping historical hole of some 400 years during which all of the ancient societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East abruptly and simultaneously went dark.
There is much we don’t know, may never know. Heck, we’re not even sure if Homer is real. The late academic and translator E.V. Rieu, who founded Penguin Classics, tells us that “[i]t is beyond question that he is the earliest surviving Greek writer; probable that he lived in the tenth century before Christ in one or other of those cities which the Greeks had established on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor; and quite likely that he actually committed his poems to writing, though the art was still perhaps hardly known save to the minstrel family to which he belonged. The rest, including his blindness, is legend or guesswork, and there is nothing to be gleaned from the text that gives us any insight into the poet’s personality. Rieu wrote that in May of 1945. Since then, scholars have come to believe that Homer, if he lived at all, was active in the eighth, not the tenth, century BCE.
It was long assumed by scholars that Troy itself was mythical. Not so. Troy was a real place. It stood at the southern shores of the Dardanelles, at the entrance to the narrow strait connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And there is evidence that a sack of the city did take place, right around 1180 BCE—in the middle of the Collapse. Was there really a Trojan War? Like, why would a people invest so much time and energy in recounting the events of a world-altering conflict that was pure fiction?
I’ve read The Odyssey twice—once in high school, for English class; and once a year or two after college, to reacquaint myself with what is one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. I liked it better the second time; I no longer joked about wanting to hurl my copy into the wine-dark sea.
Odysseus is a cool cat. Unlike Frodo and company in Lord of the Rings, who survive their perilous travels by dumb luck—the miraculous intervention of an eagle or an elf or whatever—Odysseus relies on his cunning to make it through. He is, after all, the mastermind of the “hollow horse” stratagem that broke the stalemate and won the war. He’s not a big strong brute; he’s a smarty—a character I can get behind. And the themes of The Odyssey—homecoming, exile, fidelity, honor, memory, and the Mycenaean Greek iteration of PTSD—are evergreen.
When I heard that Christopher Nolan, the auteur filmmaker who brought us Inception, Tenet, and Oppenheimer, was making The Odyssey—and with Matt Damon, of all people, in the title role—I was puzzled. The trailers I saw looked meh. Would this be a big flop? How on earth would he pull it off?
Most importantly: what is Nolan’s vision for the source material? What novel take would he bring to literally the oldest plot known to man? And: why did he feel the need to make TheOdysseynow, at this moment in history? I was less excited about the movie as I was curious. Not wanting it spoiled, I went to the Friday matinee—the first available showing.
First things first: The Odyssey is a lights-out, unequivocal masterpiece. It’s so good, on so many levels. But Anne Hathaway is the highlight. She plays Penelope—Odysseus’s wife, the Queen of Ithaca, who works dutifully at her loom waiting for her long-lost husband to come home, as a throng of uncouth, cruel, Hegsethian suitors commandeer the palace, in the hopes of winning her hand once it is determined that Odysseus is dead. (Spoiler alert: Unlike Mitch McConnell, he is not.) There is none of the warm, chipper, happy-go-lucky Prada-Devil assistant here; it’s a dark part, and she plays it dark. It’s an exquisite performance.
As usual, I underestimated Matt Damon. Oppenheimer got its share of critical flowers, but as I’ve written here, it’s basically two Wikipedia pages in film form. The problem, I realized on Friday, is that Oppenheimer, the character, is kind of dull. Only when Matt Damon shows up does Oppenheimer pick up the pace and become entertaining. In TheOdyssey, Nolan makes the wise decision to dispense with the dull centerpiece guy entirely and make the whole film about the Matt Damon character.
Odysseus is no physical marvel. He’s a soldier, so he’s not soft, but he’s an archer, not a swordsman. Damon is Jason Bourne fit, but, although he’s actually 5’10”, he looks smaller on screen—he’s literally a short king!—whereas Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae and the leader of the Greeks, is a veritable giant, imposing and terrible. In Troy as in the NBA: size matters.
As for Nolan’s novel take, his original vision? He simply makes the story as realistic as possible—and, given the inherent challenges of making a tale involving Cyclopses and Circean pigs realistic, he pulls it off beautifully.
In an early scene, Odysseus and Penelope are in bed, their toddler son Telemachus asleep nearby, and he is lamenting the fact that he has to leave to go to a war he doesn’t particularly want to fight in. The official reason Agamemnon summoned all the vassal kings to sack Troy is because the Trojans have kidnapped his brother Menelaus’s wife. That would be Helen, whose face, as Menelaus notes in the film, launched a thousand ships (even though those lines were written by another British Christopher, Marlowe, in 1604). Duty and honor demand that the Greeks assemble to bring her home.
But the great Mycenaean king, Odysseus tells Penelope, has an ulterior motive. “He wants to control the trade routes.” In other words, the Dardanelles that Troy sits upon are the Late Bronze Age Straits of Hormuz. All that sacrifice, all that bloodshed, all that destruction—all for a little more coin. So “dedicated” is Agamemnon to his imperial designs that he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis, for [checks notes] favorable winds. Yikes.
When I first read The Odyssey, I found the Penelope/Telemachus storyline dull. (I was too young to really get it). That’s not the case in the film. The father is gone and may never return; the mother is besieged like Troy itself by the same ilk of ruffians, and is holding out as long as she can; the son understands all of this, but is too raw and soft and young to do anything about it. No one takes him seriously. The kid needs to grow up, and grow up fast; if not, his mother will be taken by one of the odious suitors, and he, Telemachus, will surely be slain, so that the victor can assume the throne of Ithaca himself.
Those are the stakes.
Robert Pattinson, who plays the villainous lead suitor, Antinous, is not going to be denied. It is a delightfully “meta” moment when he contrives to be alone with Penelope, and tries to persuade her to abandon hope of Odysseus’s return and instead marry him; this is freakin’ Edward from Twilight, still one of the most attractive men alive, veritably catapulting pheromones at her; if she isn’t tempted by that, nothing will tempt her.
Agamemnon’s homecoming ends quickly and tragically—with his wife, Clytemnestra, murdering him, to avenge the sacrifice of their daughter to the gods. (In the mythology, Clytemnestra and Helen are half-sisters; in the film, they are twins, both played by Lupita Nyong’o—much to the dismay of MAGA nation, who cannot conceive of a Black woman’s face being worthy of launching even a couple of dinghies, let alone a thousand ships.) Hoping to avoid a similar fate, Odysseus, with the divine guidance of his patron Athene, returns to Ithaca in disguise as an old beggar, to assess the situation before he makes his move.
One of the weaknesses of Nolan as a filmmaker is that, as great as his movies are, they lack emotional wallop. He can be cold and dispassionate, and when I watch the films, I rarely respond emotionally to them. For example, in Oppenheimer, when the test bomb explodes successfully, we are supposed to be emotionally moved; I wasn’t. That weakness is not on display here. Whether it’s the sublimity of the source material, or simply, as one review has it, that Nolan has finally “learnt to write women,” there are a number of moving sequences in The Odyssey. The moment when Penelope realizes, beyond all doubt, that the beggar in her dining hall is indeed Odysseus is the single best part of the movie.
(The runtime, incidentally, is two hours 52 minutes, which is about as long as it takes a lead-footed New Yorker to drive from Troy to Ithaca.)
Nolan brings out the inherent feminist elements of The Odyssey. In Homer’s world, the women—whether they are gods or mortals—are more powerful than the men. Whatever Agamemnon’s ambitions, the impetus of the Trojan War is the kidnapping of Helen of Troy (which, if we believe the mythology, was itself the result of a squabble among the goddesses Athene, Aphrodite, and Hera). The suitors in the hall at Ithaca are intimidating dudes, but they would fight to the death to claim Penelope’s hand; she has enormous influence over them. It is a nymph, Calypso, who rescues Odysseus and nurses him back to physical health—and helps ease him back into reality. (My theory is that the reason Odysseus dilly-dallied on Calypso’s island for seven years is because that’s how long it took him to come up with a plausible excuse for why he remained “stranded” for so long with his gumad Charlize Theron.) Athene is the goddess that gives him protection. In Mycenae, mighty Agamemnon, the king of kings, is felled by his wife. And as to the epic’s other men? They are pigs—as Circe well knew.
Why did Nolan make this movie now, at this moment in history? J. Robert Oppenheimer and Odysseus have something in common: both used their superior intelligence to devise a way to sack a city and, in so doing, win a war. Both men had to live with the consequences of that: the guilt, the weight of the responsibility for the lost lives and the mindless destruction, the glory, the infamy—all of it. Oppenheimer and The Odyssey are both about brilliant, complicated men coming to terms with their pivotal roles in a great war.
There are several mentions in the film of the Sea People. To Penelope, they are terrifying heralds of what feels to her like the end of the world. Odysseus feels the dread, too. His stratagem, brilliant as it was, was a trick that took advantage of the honor of the Trojan people. It worked, yes; but it was a dick move. He violated Zeus’s Law, as he says in the film—and without that, what remains? In the final analysis, what was really won?
Assuming the sack of Troy was real, the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened so soon after the Trojan War that one can reasonably conclude that the latter somehow led to the former. Petty squabbles among the Greeks and Troy weakened all the kingdoms, leaving them vulnerable to invasion by the Sea Peoples—or so the film intimates. Does Nolan see a parallel between then and now?
Traditionally, this kind of epic is populated by characters with British accents. But Nolan—who was born in London and speaks with a British accent himself—made a different choice. The characters all talk like Americans—as if Troy and Ithaca were in Upstate New York and not the Aegean.
This serves two purposes. First, it makes it seem like these characters, for U.S. audiences at least, exist in the here and now, heightening the realism. Second, it equates the Mycenaean Greeks on the verge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse with the United States in A.D. 2026.
We don’t know what caused the Collapse. Probably it was the result of a number of factors that happened simultaneously: plague; famine brought on by climate change; needless wars over trade routes; alliances breaking down; income inequality exacerbated by a ruling oligarchy; bad leadership; and, maybe, the Sea Peoples. Whatever the cause, the Collapse was the end—not of the world, as Penelope feared, but certainly of a long and fruitful chapter of history.
With the looming stock market crash brought on by speculation in AI and data centers; the burning-of-Library-of-Alexandria-level destruction of our government’s investment in medical research; the fracturing of NATO; the avarice of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the Epstein class; the irrevocable warming of the planet caused by manmade climate change; and the worst possible people governing the country, the end of our current chapter seems imminent.
How did we get here? How did it come to this?
Our enemies the Russians did not invade the United States. They were not strong enough to do so. Instead, they tricked the American electorate into installing a Kremlin stooge in the White House—not once, but twice.
Odysseus devised his famous stratagem three thousand years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Even those who haven’t heard of Homer, much less read his work, know of the trick. It’s been famous for thousands of years.
Trump may be more porcine than equine—a Circe product. Even so, after all this time, we should have been able to spot a Trojan horse.
L.C. Francis authors the blog “L.C. Francis Open Society for History and Civics.” In this post, he imagines how Benjamin Franklin would react if he could time-travel to the present day. He titled this one “A Republic in a Costly Costume.”
His subtitle is:
Benjamin Franklin visits Washington and finds the experiment alive, wounded, witty, dangerous, and leaning toward the very monarchy it was built to resist.
“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, published in The New-England Courant, July 1722.
Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I wrote about Adams and Jefferson, two bitter friends who died on the Fourth of July, fifty years after the Declaration. But for weeks, another question has been on my mind: what would one founder think if he returned for America’s 250th birthday?
On this Sunday morning, after the fireworks have quieted and the crowds have gone home, I did not want to hand you another stack of bad news. I did not want to build another time machine just for cleverness. I chose Benjamin Franklin because, of all the Founders, he might be the least surprised by what he found in Washington in 2026.
Franklin was intimately aware of monarchial tendencies because he had known kings, ministers, courtiers, printers, mobs, frauds, scientists, diplomats, and men who mistook applause for wisdom. He would not arrive appalled by our foolishness. He would arrive amused, worried, and already reaching for his pen, because sometimes a Republic needs to hear the truth from a man who understood both human weakness and the strange miracle of self-government.
I visualized him observing the ruined East Wing, the ballroom adjacent to the People’s House, the painted Reflecting Pool, attacks on the press, a craving for royal attention, and an occupant of the People’s House who is more eager to be admired than to serve our Republic.
Then Franklin writes home…Hope you find this insightful & enlightening.
Dispatch on the Status of Our Republic
Washington City July 5, 2026
My Esteemed Friends,
Having been conveyed, by means I cannot explain, into a future age that corresponds to 250 years from our time, and finding myself in the city your posterity has raised for the administration of the Republic, I have thought it prudent to send you a few observations before I am returned, if I am permitted to be returned to our time.
Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson will be pleased to hear that our Republic still exists in form. Elections take place, courts at the national, state, and local levels continue to interpret the law, newspapers continue to publish, and the public debates with such fervor that I almost thought the entire nation was a printing press.
Yet I confess that the condition of the Executive office gave me pause.
We once quarreled with George III because no free people should be governed by the vanity of one man. I now find, to my astonishment, a chief magistrate who appears to regard that monarch not as a warning but as an interior decorator. He favors ceremony, obedience, personal loyalty, public flattery, and buildings large enough to persuade small minds that greatness has occurred.
I had hoped your descendants would remember that we rejected monarchy not because crowns were uncomfortable, but because men wearing them became so.
The President’s residence, also called the People’s House and meant as a duty-bound home, has been significantly transformed. A wing was removed, and a ballroom was added. Donors gather nearby, contractors appear pleased. The words reflect public service, but the atmosphere feels like courtly flattery. I’ve strolled through Versailles and seen men bow so deeply they could pick pockets unnoticed. Now, even the Potomac seems to have acquired a touch of French elegance.
I am told this is all done for greatness. I have found that when a man must constantly proclaim his greatness, the evidence is usually still under construction.
As a printer, I paid especially close attention to the press, and this issue grew more serious the longer I spent in this era. The current President doesn’t just dislike criticism; all public figures dislike it, though some handle it more gracefully. This gentleman, with a countenance the color of an apricot or a persimmon, seems to believe himself to be the reincarnation of the courts of France and, therefore, the press should praise him, obey him, change geography in his favor, and apologize whenever inconvenient facts emerge.
One news service was punished for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico on command, as though a president could improve geography by signing it in a larger hand. Broadcasters have been threatened. Reporters are treated as enemies when they ask questions rather than bring incense. Lawsuits are brandished like royal decrees. It reminded me of old George III, though fairness requires this confession: George was born into a monarchy. He did not have to assemble one from wounded vanity, public entertainments, donor money, and several coats of gold paint.
Permit an old printer to be plain: a free press is not an ornament of liberty. It is one of its tools. A government that fears printers has already confessed more than printers have written.
I also observed that nearly every citizen carries a small glowing glass into which he may speak a question and receive an answer before his own judgment has had time to put on its shoes. This instrument is astonishing. It fetches a fact, composes a letter, translates a tongue, summarizes a book, and offers counsel with the confidence of a lawyer who has not yet found the statute. Much of what it provides is helpful, though some is incorrect. Its rapid delivery might lead a lazy mind to equate speed with wisdom.
I say this as one who loved invention: no machine, however clever, can spare a Republic the burden of discernment. A device may gather the lightning, but only judgment can make the rod.
Nevertheless, I do not lose hope.
I observed citizens carefully counting votes. I saw judges trying to keep the law from becoming a command. I saw teachers, librarians, clerks, veterans, reporters, and ordinary Americans doing the quiet work no ballroom can replace. They receive little applause, which may be why their service remains valuable.
When we gave the people a Republic, I warned that keeping it would be their burden. Upon further reflection, after visiting our Republic for the first time in 250 years, I would only add this: beware the man who loves the symbols of our country more than its restraints. Beware the patriot who attacks the press, flatters himself with marble, and treats public office as family property. George III lost America by misunderstanding Americans. It would be a poor anniversary indeed if Americans returned the favor by misunderstanding George III.
Tell our friends in Philadelphia that the Republic has not failed. The forms remain: elections, courts, printers, laws, and that blessed American habit of arguing with everyone within reach.
But the balance has shifted toward one man’s office in a manner that would please Mr. Hamilton, satisfy much of Mr. Adams, send Mr. Jefferson searching for ink and a quill, and prompt Paul Revere to get back on horseback. The President now stands so enlarged that many citizens seem less interested in restraining him than in being near enough to admire the glow.
This is the warning I carry home: a Republic may keep its papers and still lose its posture. If the people do not soon pull power back toward Congress, the courts, the press, the states, and themselves, they may wake to find they have not crowned a king but have trained themselves to obey one.
Our democratic experiment continues, but it now dangerously leans toward the very thing we crossed an ocean of trouble to resist.
I remain, as ever, Your affectionate friend and humble servant, B. Franklin
P.S. I hope this dispatch finds you in good health and, if possible, in better shade than I presently enjoy, for the heat here is dreadful. I am told the current chief magistrate has intellectual doubts that the climate itself can change, which is a curious position in an age that can weigh the stars, split the atom, and yet still offends itself by consulting a thermometer.
The story of the John F.Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is tragic. It was one of the nation’s finest venues for the arts. It contained an opera company, an orchestra, performances of all kind, and a beautiful art collection.
Soon after he was elected, Trump decided to impose his ideas, his board, his leadership on the Kennedy Center.
He quickly replaced the board, his board made him its president, and installed his own people. He fired the professional arts administrators and named Richard Grennell as its executive director, despite his lack of any experience in arts management.
Grennell laid off hundreds of employees. The board voted to add Trump ‘s name to the facade of the Center. Overnight, it became the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The rank politicization of the Center’s programming was deeply polarizing. Ticket sales plummeted. Artists cancelled their performances.
Where once the Kennedy Center was proudly nonpartisan, Trump purged anyone not aligned with his views and his cult.
Faced with a dwindling audience and boycotts by artists, the board announced that the Center would close for two years for”renovations.” Observers worried that Trump intended to tear the building down.
In response to a lawsuit followed by a Congressionally appointed member of the board, a federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name from the facade, the signage, and everything else.
Today, the once vibrant Kennedy Center is mostly empty. The opera left. The symphony has no schedule. Few people visit.
Trump gutted the Kennedy Center. Did he do it on purpose or was it the result of incompetence? Was he envious of John F. Kennedy? Or did he miscalculate his ability to manage a performing arts center?
This article is an interview with long-serving volunteer tour guide. After it appeared, the Kennedy Center suspended the tours.
Diane Ravitch's blog 